New Show Recap: Justified 5×02, “The Kids Aren’t All Right”

And by “kids” we mean pretty much everyone who was ever a kid. A cloud of doom and menace hung over this episode of Justified like the proverbial Sword of Damocles and the fact that it remained, for the most part, unfulfilled (for now!), made it all the more disturbing.

The age-appropriate kids in question, though, are Low-retta and her boyfriend, Derek. When we last saw Justified’s favorite teenager, Raylan was warning her against spending Mags Bennett’s drug empire fortune by hiring Van Halen to play her birthday party. She might have been better served if he’d warned her against stealing money from Hot Rod, the Memphis King of Marijuana, but let’s be honest, she wouldn’t have listened.

Raylan, Tim and Rachel (Tim and Rachel! We need more Tim and Rachel!) are occupied confiscating the home and property of Mr. Rich Guy, who purchased said home and property with funds earned by laundering money for the Detroit mob. Raylan gets a phone call from a cop in Lexington telling him Loretta has been arrested for selling drugs and has been throwing his name around. He arrives to find her sitting in a jail cell but instead of getting her out, he wishes her luck and leaves her there. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time, kids.

On the way out he first runs into Loretta’s ne’er-do-well boyfriend and drug selling partner, Derek (who is vocally unhappy that Raylan was a dick about springing Loretta) and then Allison, Loretta’s pretty blonde social worker who immediately starts wondering if she’s wearing underwear (which is probably a common reaction to meeting Raylan). She’s not happy that Raylan didn’t go easy on Loretta, either, but she’s nicer about it, especially since Raylan is busy oozing his special brand of laconic charm all over her. He might have met his match, though, since Allison leaves him on the steps with his hand out waiting for a business card she doesn’t give him.

Mostly to impress Allison, Raylan tracks down Derek and finds him with Avon Barskdale Wood and Steve Harris, a pair of brothers playing a pair of brothers serving as Hot Rod’s enforcers and searching for the money Loretta and Derek scammed out of one of the Memphis drug lord’s now newly deceased former employees. The brothers and Raylan exchange some veiled threats about killing each other before Raylan shoos them away so he can tell Derek that he has to break up with Loretta. (Holy shit! Avon Barksdale is in Harlan! *Fingers crossed* for Stringer Bell? Pretty please? Idrisssssss…)

As it happens, Loretta might already be thinking along those lines because, without telling Derek, she stole the already stolen money from the hole in which they hid it. That fact comes as a very unwelcome surprise when the Harris brothers kidnap Derek and force him to dig up the money that, obviously, isn’t there anymore.

Loretta has enough leftover concern to run back to Raylan once more when Derek goes missing. He gets the whole story out of her so before Derek ends up making an unmarked grave out of that hole he just dug, Raylan is there taking a shovel to one of the Harris brothers and drawing a gun on the other. They’re still cool and shit, though (except for the one writhing on the ground with a dent in his head shaped like a shovel) because no matter what happens to them, Hot Rod will keep coming after Loretta and Derek until he gets his money back.

That doesn’t sit well with Raylan so he keeps everyone in check until the Man from Memphis himself (not Elvis) shows up. Raylan and Hot Rod have a dick measuring contest, which Raylan wins (tell me you’re not surprised) by sharing a heart-warming story from his boyhood of watching murder committed right in front of him. In other words, Raylan is always cocked and loaded and promises to kill at least four of Hot Rod’s men and probably all of them unless Hot Rod promises to leave the kids alone and stay out of Kentucky and go back to Memphis where he belongs.

Problem solved, he drops Derek off at a bus stop and delivers Loretta back to her foster home. (And if that’s the end of that story, I’ll buy you a unicorn.)

The day’s work done, Raylan invites Allison over to Mr. Rich Guy’s confiscated house, where he’s conveniently going to be living for a few days. They’re drinking wine and eating Chinese food out of take-out containers and Raylan is sexy and fiiiiine but Allison calls him out for his baby and baby mama in Florida, and for his current living arrangements in a criminal’s house and assures him there will be no sexytimes that night. Raylan takes the news with good grace and invites her to bowl a few frames in the bowling alley installed in the basement of the house. Since the previews for next week show a lingerie-wearing Allison sitting in his bed, I’m guessing that no-sex thing didn’t last.

Raylan’s past, however, may be coming back to haunt him by way of a something a lot more serious than Loretta’s misbehaving. Sammy Tonin (who got whacked last week) apparently tried to call Raylan while he was in Florida. Art’s curiosity is aroused, even when Raylan plays the call off as being the result of his meeting with Sammy in a horse barn at Keeneland. Art calls in a favor and has an old friend look into Nicky Augustine’s bloody death in a bullet-riddled limo while Sammy Tonin waited on a private jet right beside the carnage. If you remember your Season 3 canon, you’ll recall that Raylan practically ordered that hit on Augustine; at the very least, he knew it was going to happen and did nothing to stop it. This could end very badly for Raylan.

Boyd, meanwhile, is dealing with the pressures of his drug-running business and how to get Ava out of jail.

That last bit, you’ll remember, had him beating Paxton to a bloody pulp on last week’s season premiere but lo, and behold, the old fucker is still alive (he looked dead to me!). Boyd discovers that bit of unwelcome information when mail-order-bride Mara shows up at his bar with Mooney, the asshole deputy sheriff first introduced in Season 2, who now seems to be taking the short road to getting himself killed pretty damn quick. Mooney is determined to pin Paxton’s beating on Boyd and at the hospital, Mara is quick to identify Boyd as the guilty party.

Standing right in front of Boyd, though, Mara changes her story and refuses to point the finger at him.  The sudden about-face is explained when Boyd shows up at the hospital, where she’s sitting vigil over a comatose Paxton. In a softly-voiced showdown in the stairwell, the two of them basically threaten each other: Boyd reminds her that he could just finish killing Paxton or kill her and she tells him that all she wants is to go back home to Latvia, and her silence can be bought with $300,000.

Mooney is livid, however, and Mara’s middle-of-the-night drive home is interrupted when he pulls her over on a dark and deserted street. The scene progresses just as you’d expect — he pulls her roughly out of the car, calls her a whore for selling herself in marriage to the geezer Paxton, sexually assaults her by grabbing at her breasts while clearly threatening worse, and then orders her to show up at the sheriff’s department the next day to officially identify Boyd as Paxton’s assailant. If she refuses, he’ll arrest her for the crime.

In other words, that mother fucker needs to die and when he does — hopefully at Boyd’s hands — I’m going to cheer. Loudly.

On the other hand, Boyd’s heroin business seems to be getting back on track. The Canadians have promised to make one last delivery in two days, a fact which makes his street dealers a lot happier than they are when Wynn Duffy talks to them like he’s hosting a “Get Rich Buying and Selling Real Estate” seminar.

Unfortunately, one of the dealers has loose lips (pun intended… wait for it!) and shares the details about the upcoming shipment with a street whore named Candy, in exchange for a Pop Rocks flavored blowjob. (Get it? Loose lips/candy blowjob. Ha. I kill me.) “Candy” was last seen working as “Teri” at Audrey’s and cozying up to Johnny Crowder. Is it coincidence that after she finds out about it, the heroin shipment is hijacked before Boyd can take receipt of it? I think not.

And I almost forgot to mention Dewey’s funtimes threesome with a couple of employees being interrupted by the unwelcome appearance of Florida cousin Daryl Crowe. Judging by the look on Dewey’s face when he sees Daryl, that was one family reunion he definitely wanted to avoid.